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It seems that now we can retract close votes but we cannot retract reopen votes or delete votes.

I am trying to retract my reopen vote here but it does not allow me to. Can we have that ability?

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This would be a good ability to add here.

The removal of the reopen vote should act like removing a close vote: you can remove it only once and cannot be used on said post again. Instead of the pop-up saying that are you sure that you want to reopen the question, the pop-up should say:

Are you sure you want to retract your reopen vote (the reopen vote cannot be cast again)?

It will be a simple yes/no question similar to the one for retracting close votes. It is really annoying that this has not been added for over two years and should be resolved as a 2015 resolution and not a 2016 resolution. To avoid a UX problem as told by @animuson:

This would be very dangerous from a UX perspective. The dialogs would need to look very different so users don't accidentally retract their reopen votes thinking they were casting one because they forgot they already voted. With the confirmation dialog we currently use, it's not possible to modify the appearance, so simply changing the text is a horrible idea. We'd have to actually build our own dialogs for these situations in order to prevent confusion.

We could add bold letters to "close vote" and "reopen vote" like this:

Are you sure you want to retract your reopen vote (the reopen vote cannot be cast again)?

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    This would be very dangerous from a UX perspective. The dialogs would need to look very different so users don't accidentally retract their reopen votes thinking they were casting one because they forgot they already voted. With the confirmation dialog we currently use, it's not possible to modify the appearance, so simply changing the text is a horrible idea. We'd have to actually build our own dialogs for these situations in order to prevent confusion.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 25, 2016 at 19:25
  • @animuson Interesting. I will address that later
    – Anthony Pham
    Commented Aug 25, 2016 at 20:55
  • You can now retract a reopen vote?? @Stijn be patient with these adorable little evildoers.
    – Bob Stein
    Commented Jun 4, 2017 at 13:24
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    @animuson Can you clarify for us how this would be more dangerous from a UX perspective than the current approach to retracting a close vote? The answer suggested here appears both simple and functional IMHO. There's no question that this would be valuable for a number of reasons
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Aug 19, 2017 at 14:49
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    @Elder Because reopen/delete votes only use confirmation dialogs, many users become used to clicking the link and just hitting the enter key without reading the box. Simply changing the text in that box isn't clear enough to tell them that they're retracting a vote and not casting one. Given you can't re-cast a reopen vote, that would irritate some users who are used to seeing an error message when they've already voted.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 19, 2017 at 14:57
  • @animuson With all due respect, the message that comes up when retracting a close vote seems clear as glass to me. I'm not convinced that a similar message on retracting a reopen vote would be remotely confusing. If I attempt to re-cast a reopen vote I get asked for confirmation and only if I agree to re-cast do I get an error message. Is it really that complicated to re-use some of the close vote retraction code to apply to re-open votes?
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Aug 19, 2017 at 15:10
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    @Elder Close voting requires selecting an option first, and when the options are disabled it's very obvious that something is different in the process. Simply changing text in a confirm dialog that most people don't read is not obvious at all.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 19, 2017 at 15:12
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    @animuson If that's the case than perhaps reopening should also require selecting an option like. A) improved via edit B) Closed improperly ...
    – Elder Geek
    Commented Aug 19, 2017 at 15:17
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    @Elder Or we can just wait until a dev decides to create a custom dialog for these options that we would have creative control over. The primary problem is that the built-in browser confirm dialog is not cutomizable in any way. If we could e.g. make all the text red when retracting, that might alleviate the problem. Either way, a custom dialog is required to move forward with this request.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 19, 2017 at 15:20
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    @animuson Today, there is a custom dialog for casting reopen votes, which invalidates most of your arguments. Can this be reconsidered?
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented May 5, 2020 at 5:34
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I'd like to start by apologizing for not getting to this sooner! Although we added the ability to retract Close/Reopen votes, Delete/Undelete votes operate very differently within our Data Model. TL/DR: we consider Close/Reopen as flags, while we register Delete/Undelete as actual votes in the database. Implementing this feature required refactoring on our end to actually support the concept of a vote being removed (and doing so only once, did you see that we published that feature as well?).

We're now ready to publish this feature, with a small caveat: we have some performance concerns as more data is now required when a question is loaded to allow folks to retract their vote. To mitigate our concern, this feature has been enabled only on MSO and MSE, and if everything looks ok, we will be enabling it network-wide later this week.

Thanks for being so involved in our community! I'd like to humbly ask folks to let us know if anything feels out of the ordinary in the Questions page or the Retract Delete/Undelete feature in MSO and MSE.

Edit: This is now live network-wide! I hope it will be helpful folks.

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    Thanks for getting back with us Felippe. I don't think there is any need in you humbly asking for feedback on your recent work. People will notice things that are "off" soon enough, and they will let you know about it!
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 26, 2021 at 19:11
  • Felippe here is some feedback from me: meta.stackexchange.com/q/371331/361484
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 28, 2021 at 8:52
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    @Luuklag thanks for creating a new Feature Request! I talked with some design folks and they definitely believe it makes sense (I personally believe we're overdue for better frontend standardization for components like this). For now I'll be switching the feature on network-wide, whenever that FR gets prioritized we'll tackle it.
    – Felippe Rangel StaffMod
    Commented Nov 3, 2021 at 12:40
  • Thanks for your reply Felippe. You might want to put a [status-*] tag on my FR then to have it logged somewhere automatically.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Nov 3, 2021 at 12:52
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As of the day this answer was posted, this is now for reopen votes only per this Meta Stack Overflow announcement:

This has been implemented.

This reuses the same backend code and logic as for retracting close votes, so the behavior should be exactly the same.

It is not, however, implemented for delete votes. (Update: As of November 3, 2021, it is now implemented for deleted votes.

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    We are looking into retracting delete votes and will comment on this answer as soon as we have shipped a fix.
    – Anita Taylor StaffMod
    Commented Aug 4, 2021 at 22:33
  • @AnitaTaylor Any update on the ability to retract delete votes?
    – Blue
    Commented Oct 26, 2021 at 11:22
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    @ughStackExchange Good news, we actually worked on this last sprint and shipped today. See this answer
    – Anita Taylor StaffMod
    Commented Oct 26, 2021 at 17:41

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